Transcendental Arguments

First published Fri Feb 25, 2011

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be
distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that
X is a necessary condition for the possibility
of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it
logically follows that X must be the case too. Moreover,
because these arguments are generally used to respond to skeptics who
take our knowledge claims to be problematic, the Y in
question is then normally taken to be some fact about us or our mental
life which the skeptic can be expected to accept without question
(e.g., that we have experiences, or make certain judgements, or
perform certain actions, or have certain capacities, and so on),
where X is then something the skeptic doubts or denies (e.g.,
the existence of the external world, or of the necessary causal
relation between events, or of other minds, or the force of moral
reasons). In this way, it is hoped, skepticism can be overturned using
transcendental arguments that embody such transcendental claims.

At first sight, this anti-skeptical potential of such arguments makes
them seem powerful and attractive, by offering a proof of what
otherwise might seem to be known only through inductive reasoning or
fallible experience. However, as we shall see, transcendental arguments
conceived of in this ambitious form have struggled to live up to this
promise, though they still have their devotees. Nonetheless, the
potential for such arguments has been kept alive, by reassessing their
possible uses, where it has been suggested that they can perhaps be
given a more modest role, which then makes them more viable and enables
their apparent difficulties to be set aside. Whether this is indeed the
case, and whether even if it is this then leaves them denuded of their
anti-skeptical value and allure, remains an open question, and will be
discussed further below. We will also consider how far transcendental
arguments can serve a role not just in epistemology in defending our
claims to knowledge, but also in ethics, in persuading the skeptic of
the force of certain moral considerations and principles.

Although Immanuel Kant rarely uses the term ‘transcendental
argument’, and when he does it is not in our current sense (cf.
Hookway 1999: 180 n. 8), he nonetheless speaks frequently of
‘transcendental deductions’, ‘transcendental
expositions’, and ‘transcendental proofs’, which
roughly speaking have the force of what is today meant by
‘transcendental argument’. Prior exemplars of such
arguments may perhaps by claimed, such as Aristotle's proof of the
principle of non-contradiction (see Metaphysics
1005b35–1006a28; Illies 2003: 45–6, Walker 2006: 240 and
255–6); but Kant nonetheless formulated what are generally taken
to be the central examples of such arguments, so the history of the
topic is usually assumed to start here, with the Critique of Pure
Reason and its Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, Second
Analogy, and Refutation of Idealism. Briefly put, the Deduction is
directed against skepticism concerning the applicability of a priori
concepts to our experience; the Second Analogy concerns doubts over
causal powers or forces; while the Refutation of Idealism focuses on
our apparent lack of knowledge concerning the existence of the
external world.

Perhaps because of its brevity and relative clarity, but also perhaps
because of the hope it can be made ‘self-standing’ and
independent of the (to some) disreputable machinery of transcendental
idealism [see §3 of the entry on
Immanuel Kant], it is the Refutation that has
become the paradigm to many of a transcendental argument. While the
wisdom of this can be questioned (cf. Bell 1999), the Refutation
undoubtedly makes a useful place for us to start.

As presented by Kant, the Refutation is aimed at the
‘problematic idealism of Descartes’, who holds that the
existence of objects outside us in space is ‘doubtful and
indemonstrable’ (Kant 1781/1787 B274)—where, as Kant
famously remarks in the Preface to the second edition of
the Critique in which he comments on the Refutation,
‘it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human
reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after
all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense)
should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it
occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a
satisfactory proof’ (Kant 1781/1787 Bxxxix note). Kant's
strategy in response then sets the canonical pattern for a
transcendental argument, in beginning from what the skeptic takes for
granted, namely that we have mental states which we experience as
having a temporal order, and then arguing for the transcendental claim
that experience of this sort would not be possible unless we also had
generally veridical experience of things in space outside us, and thus
knowledge of the external world. In more detail, the argument can be
presented as follows (cf. Kant 1781/1787 B275–79 and
Bxxxix–xli note):

(1)

You are aware of your inner mental states (thoughts and
sensations) as having a temporal order (e.g., that the sensation of
pain you are having now was preceded in time by a feeling of
pleasure).

(2)

To be aware of your mental states as having a temporal order, you
must be aware of something that existed from the time of your previous
mental state to the present.

(3)

For that awareness of permanence to be possible, it is not
sufficient to have awareness of your self (because no permanent self is
revealed to us in inner sense, as Hume argued: see Hume 1739–40: 252)
or to have impressions or representations (because these impressions
have a ‘perishing existence,’ as Hume also argued: see Hume
1739–40: 194).

Therefore

(4)

The “permanent” of which you are aware must be
something that is neither you qua subject nor your subjective
impressions but must be something distinct from both of these, that is,
an object outside you in the external world.

Therefore

(5)

Your awareness of the external world cannot come from a prior
awareness of your subjective impressions because the latter awareness
is not possible without the former, and so awareness of the external
world cannot be based on the imagination but rather comes from
generally veridical experiences.

In this way, Kant hoped to ‘turn the game played by idealism
against itself’ (cf. B276), by working from the inner experience
that it takes for granted and showing that this depends on an outer
experience which the idealist doubts, so that in this manner the
‘scandal to philosophy’ posed by such doubts can finally be
resolved.

However, despite its brevity, the Refutation has given rise to
considerable dispute and discussion, not only because questions can be
raised about the details of the argument, but also because Kant's
wider theoretical commitments to transcendental idealism have also
rendered the Refutation problematic and his intentions unclear: for
example, doesn't the argument undermine Kant's own
idealism in some way, and how does the Refutation relate to the
somewhat similar argument in the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition
of the Critique (A366–80), but in which an appeal to
transcendental idealism plays a greater role? These complications have
led to a range of disputes concerning the Refutation, from whether or
not it can be made cogent, to whether or not it fits within
Kant's own philosophical project, and indeed whether focusing on
this as Kant's response to skepticism distorts his conception of
skepticism, and how he thought it should be resolved. (For further
discussion of the Refutation, see Guyer 1987: 279–332, Caranti 2007,
Dicker 2008.)

While transcendental arguments found a place in philosophy after Kant,
particularly in the German idealist tradition (cf. Franks 1999, Franks
2005: 201–59, Taylor 1976, Beiser 2005: 174–91), their prominence in
more contemporary philosophy is largely due to the work of P. F.
Strawson, and particularly his earlier books Individuals and
The Bounds of Sense—the latter of which is a
commentary on Kant's Critique, while the former is
written under its influence in a broader way. One example from these
works is the ‘objectivity argument’ to be found in The
Bounds of Sense, which aims to show that ‘[u]nity of diverse
experiences in a single consciousness requires experience of
objects’; the argument may be outlined as follows (see Strawson
1966: 97–112, esp. 108):

(1)

Being self-conscious is a matter of being able to ascribe diverse
experiences to oneself, whilst being conscious of the unity of that to
which they are ascribed.

(2)

To be in a position to think of experiences as one's own,
one must be able to think of them as experiences.

(3)

For experience to be such as to provide room for thought of
experience itself, it must provide room for a distinction between ‘This
is how things are’ and ‘This is how things are experienced as
being’.

(4)

Only experience of objects that are subject-independent could
provide room for this is/seems distinction.

Therefore

(5)

Subject-independent objects exist.

In this way, Strawson hoped to capture what he took to be the
central core of Kant's position, but without appeal to the
‘doctrines of transcendental psychology’ (Strawson 1966:
97), which he found to be problematic. Likewise, in
Individuals, Strawson presented an argument starting from the
premise that we think of the world as containing objective particulars
in a single spatiotemporal system, to the conclusion that objects
continue to exist unperceived, where the latter is said to required in
order to make possible the kind of identification and re-identification
necessary for the former (cf. Stawson 1959: 31–58). Thus, as Strawson
famously put it, the skeptic ‘pretends to accept a conceptual
scheme’ of a world containing objects in a spatio-temporal
system, ‘but at the same time quietly rejects one of the
conditions of its employment’ (Strawson 1959: 35).

On the basis of the promise of arguments of this sort from Strawson,
and from others (such as Shoemaker 1963: 168–9), together with growing
interest in the work of Kant himself within analytic philosophy, this
period of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a significant one for the
history of transcendental arguments, leading to much subsequent
discussion. At the same time, central Wittgensteinian doctrines
prominent at the time (such as the notion of ‘criteria’:
see §3.3 of the entry on
other minds)
were also given a
transcendental inflection, so certain Wittgensteinian claims came to
take on the form of transcendental arguments (cf. Rorty 1971:3, where
he comments that ‘Many admirers of Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations and of Strawson's
Individuals have taken the theme of both books to be an
analysis of philosophical skepticism and their distinctive contribution
to be a new way of criticizing the skeptic’). However, crucial to
the debates of the period were also a number of critical articles
pointing to the perceived limitation of the transcendental approach,
including those by Stefan Körner (Körner 1966, 1967, 1969)
and by Barry Stroud (Stroud 1968), where the latter in particular
shaped the ensuing discussion over the value of transcendental
arguments and what they could be expected to achieve, as we shall see
in section 3.

Nonetheless, while the intervention by Stroud and others led to
second-thoughts by some at the meta-level, as theorists asked if these
critiques held good and if so what might remain of the transcendental
approach, this did not deter prominent philosophers continuing to
produce transcendental arguments. Two of these may serve as further
exemplars of the genre, where both have gone on to be much discussed.
The first was offered by Hilary Putnam in relation to external world
skepticism once again, and the second by Donald Davidson, this time
relating more directly to the problem of other minds.

Putnam's argument comes in Chapter 1 of Reason, Truth and
History, where his goal is to refute a modern-day version of
Descartes' evil demon hypothesis, according to which I do not inhabit a
world containing ordinary physical objects (trees, tables, houses), but
I am a brain in a vat in a lab whose experiences are caused by a
computer artificially stimulating my nerve endings, so that none of
these objects actually exist beyond my hallucinatory impression of
them. This is the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, and it stands for the
possibility that, for all I know, nothing rules out the world being
very different from how it appears to me to be, given the gap that
exists between appearance (our experience of it) and reality.

Now, Putnam's response to the skeptic is to argue that though we
cannot rule out the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis on the grounds of how
things appear to us, we can rule it out nonetheless. How? Putnam's
claim is that we can rule it out because on a plausible theory of
reference, it is self-refuting: that is, ‘I am a brain-in-a-vat
[or BIV, for short]’ cannot be truly affirmed by anyone. The
theory of reference Putnam uses as a premise is a causal one, which
states that ‘one cannot refer to certain kinds of things,
e.g., trees, if one has no causal interaction at all with
them, or with things in terms of which they can be described’
(Putnam 1981: 16–17). Putnam defends this theory, on the grounds
that it alone can explain how reference occurs in a way that is not
‘magical’, i.e., which does not assume that the connection
is just somehow intrinsic between representations and their
referents. It then follows, according to Putnam, that a BIV affirming
‘I am a BIV’ is saying something true only if the BIV is
in what the BIV is calling a ‘vat’. But the BIV is not in
one of those; rather, he is in a real vat. What he is calling
a ‘vat’ is that to which his use of that term causally
connects in a referential way—where for a BIV, that is something
in the computer that prompts his applications of ‘vat’ by
giving him hallucinations of the appearance of vats. Yet the BIV is
not in that part of the computer. Thus, Putnam concludes, ‘I am
a BIV’ cannot be truly asserted by anyone, much like ‘I do
not exist’ or ‘I cannot construct a meaningful
sentence’ (cf. Bardon 2005). It therefore cannot ever be wrong
to assert that one is not a BIV, so that in this sense ‘I am not
a BIV’ is an incorrigible claim (cf. Putnam 1981:
14–15). Putnam therefore holds that we can rule out the BIV
hypothesis on a priori grounds, and thus refute the skeptic.

Putnam is keen to emphasise the transcendental nature of his enterprise
in this respect. He stresses that the kinds of constraints on reference
that operate here and disprove the BIV hypothesis are not physical or
merely analytic, but involve limitations on what is possible that can
be arrived at through philosophical reflection on the nature of
representation and meaning, and hence fit into a broadly Kantian model
of how to respond to skepticism, albeit with more empirical
elements:

What we have been doing is considering the preconditions
for thinking about, representing, referring to, etc. We have
investigated these preconditions not by investigating the
meaning of these words and phrases (as a linguist might, for example)
but by reasoning a priori. Not in the old
‘absolute’ sense (since we do not claim that magical
theories of reference are a priori wrong), but in the sense
of inquiring into what is
reasonably possible assuming certain general
premisses, or making certain very broad theoretical assumptions. Such
a procedure is neither ‘empirical’ nor quite ‘a
priori’, but has elements of both ways of investigating. In
spite of the fallibility of my procedure, and its dependence upon
assumptions which might be described as ‘empirical’ (e.g.,
the assumption that the mind has no access to external things or
properties apart from that provided by the senses), my procedure has a
close relation to what Kant called a ‘transcendental’
investigation; for it is an investigation, I repeat, of
the preconditions of reference and hence of
thought—preconditions built in to the nature of our minds
themselves, though not (as Kant hoped) wholly independent of empirical
assumptions. (Putnam 1981: 16)

As a result of his attempt to respond to external world skepticism
in this way, Putnam has had an important influence in reviving interest
in the possibility of using transcendental arguments against
skepticism. (For further discussion of Putnam's position, see
Brueckner 1986, Coppock 1987, Heil 1987, David 1991, Brueckner 1992,
Caranti 2007: 110–13.)

Finally, we may turn to the work of Donald Davidson, who like Putnam
bases his transcendental claim on a form of externalism, which links
the content of our mental states to how we relate to our environment;
but in his case, this idea is directed against skepticism concerning
other minds. Thus, while the skeptic holds that the existence of such
minds is doubtful, Davidson argues that it would not be possible for a
creature like me to have thoughts unless I lived in a world with other
creatures who also had thoughts, so the truth of the latter can be
deduced from the fact that I am indeed capable of thinking: ‘What are
the conditions necessary for the existence of thought, and so in
particular for the existence of people with thoughts? I believe there
could not be thoughts in one mind if there were no other thoughtful
creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world’ (Davidson
1989: 193). Davidson's transcendental argument is based on his account
of what it takes for a thought to have content, for which he argues
that a process of ‘triangulation’ must occur, whereby the content of
the thought someone is having is ‘fixed’ by the way in which someone
else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world. Thus,
Davidson argues, if there were no other people, the content of our
thoughts would be totally indeterminate, and we would in effect have no
thoughts at all; from the self-evident falsity of the latter, he
therefore deduces the falsity of the former (cf. Davidson 1991:
159–60). Davidson therefore argues that the mistake the skeptic makes,
in common with the Cartesian heritage of which he is part, is in the
assumption that it is possible to be a lone thinker:
Davidson's transcendental argument is designed to show that this
is not in fact the case, given the constraints on what it takes to have
thoughts with content, so that the existence of a single thinking
subject entails the existence of others.

As Davidson suggests (cf. Davidson 1991: 157), his position here might
be said to have certain similarities to that put forward in
Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, at least under the
interpretation given by Kripke (see Kripke 1982). Kripke takes
Wittgenstein as arguing that it is impossible to make sense of what it
is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing
is following the practice of others who are like-minded: what makes our
continuation of some addition rule a case of rule-following at all (for
example), is that the community goes on in the same way; and, unless
addition were rule-governed as a practice, statements like ‘2+2=4’
could have no meaning. Thus, from the fact that we are able to make
such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others
that ‘fix’ this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for
the former (cf. Kripke 1982: 89). On this view, then, unless the
skeptic is prepared to admit the existence of this community of
fellow-speakers, and thus attribute a capacity for intentional
rule-following to those around him, he cannot make sense of the idea of
meaningful thought in his own case.

We have therefore seen that taking their inspiration from Kant to a
greater or lesser degree, philosophers have come to develop a range of
transcendental arguments that are intended to refute skepticism in a
robust and ambitious manner, by establishing anti-skeptical conclusions
on the basis of transcendental claims. From these exemplars and others,
therefore, we may now say something further about how such arguments
work and what makes them distinctive.

From something like the canon of transcendental arguments outlined
above, the characteristic marks of such arguments might be listed as
follows:

1. Transcendental arguments are anti-skeptical, so that (as Strawson
puts it) it is widely assumed that ‘the point of transcendental
arguments in general is an anti-sceptical point’ (Strawson 1985:
10). Moreover, in the ambitious form in which we have considered them
so far, they refute the skeptic in a direct manner, by purporting to
prove what she doubts or questions, and they do so on their own,
without bringing in any wider epistemological theories or
considerations. And these arguments are what is sometimes called
world-directed or ­truth-directed (cf. Peacocke
1989: 4; Cassam 1997: 33; Cassam 1999: 83): that is, they set out to
establish the truth of some claim about how reality is and what it
contains (such as subject-independent objects in space and time, or
other minds, or causal laws).

2. Because of their anti-skeptical ambitions, transcendental
arguments must begin from a starting point that the skeptic can be
expected to accept, the necessary condition of which is then said to be
something that the skeptic doubts or denies. This will then mean that
such arguments are ineffective against very radical forms of
skepticism, which doubt the laws of logic, and/or which refuse to
accept any starting point as uncontentious; and it will also
mean that they may be effective against a skeptic who is prepared to
accept some starting point, but then ineffective against another
skeptic who is not. But neither of these features of transcendental
arguments need be felt to be disabling: for the skepticism of the
radical skeptics is perhaps of dubious coherence, or at least of little
interest because they seem so unwilling to engage with us, while the
second limitation may mean merely that different transcendental
arguments are required for different skeptical audiences.

3. Because of the need to find an uncontentious starting point,
transcendental arguments will also then characteristically be first
personal, by beginning from how I or we experience,
think, judge, and so on. Thus, while it is perhaps reasonable to hold
that there are necessary conditions for the possibility of
‘extra-personal’ entities such as material objects,
substances, the universe, time and so on, a transcendental argument
which is directed against skepticism is unlikely to be concerned with
exploring such conditions, as the skeptic is unlikely to admit the
existence of the things to which the conditions belong.

4. Transcendental arguments involve transcendental claims,
to the effect that X is a necessary condition for the
possibility of Y, where in saying this, the arguments do not
assume this to be a matter of merely causal or natural necessity. Given
that their target is the skeptic who challenges our claims about the
world, there are clearly two good reasons for this. First, although our
observation of the world might suggest that experience has certain
necessary causal conditions (e.g., light and sound must be transmitted
between particular wavelengths), we can hardly use such considerations
against a skeptic of this sort, for whom all such empirical knowledge
is in question, and against whom we are therefore required to adopt a
position that is less open to doubt in this way. Second, if the
transcendental argument's claim is one of only natural necessity,
then this allows that there are possible worlds (for example, where the
laws of physics do not hold) in which this claim is false, again
opening us up to the skeptical challenge of showing we are not in such
a world.

5. However, if the transcendental claims involved are not a matter of
merely causal or natural necessity, this then raises the question of
what form of necessity they do in fact involve. If they were
true in virtue of their meaning alone (even if unobviously so), and
thus analytic, then the necessity might be said to be purely logical,
where to deny the claim is then to assert some form of logical
contradiction (cf. Bennett 1979, Walker 1978: 18–23, Walker
1989: 63–4, Bell 1999). However, this may not seem to be the
case in many instances of such transcendental claims, where in fact
they may be said to be synthetic a priori (cf. Wilkerson 1976:
199–213), while the whole analytic/synthetic distinction is
itself fraught with difficulty. To many, nonetheless, it has appeared
that the transcendental claim is not a logical necessity, but stands
somewhere between that and natural necessity, perhaps putting it into
the camp of metaphysical necessity, as this is sometimes
understood: that is, a necessary relation which holds not by virtue of
logical or causal constraints on the nature of logical or physical
possibilities, but by virtue of metaphysical constraints on how things
can be—much as the fact that nothing can be red and green all
over is arguably not determined by any law of logic or causal law, but
the nature of colour, and how it can be exemplified in things.

6. It is then partly because of the apparently rather special nature
of these transcendental claims, that the suspicion arises that there
will then turn out to be something distinctively Kantian about such
arguments; for Kant made it the focus of his critical project to
account for metaphysical knowledge of this sort, where transcendental
idealism is then supposed to provide the answer to how such knowledge
is possible. The idea, roughly speaking, is that it is too much for us
to be able to know how things must be beyond the limits of our
experience, and so claim metaphysical knowledge of
things-in-themselves. By contrast, once we confine ourselves to how
things appear to us given our ways of seeing and thinking about the
world, then we can understand how we could at least acquire knowledge
of how things must behave as phenomena, by knowing about the forms of
intuitions and concepts through which such phenomena must appear to us
if we are to experience them at all (cf. Williams 1974, Pippin 1988,
Stroud 1999, Stroud 2000a). However, as we saw in the case of Strawson,
whether or not such full-blooded Kantian commitments are necessary to
the transcendental argument strategy is a matter of dispute. Indeed,
some have argued that there is a ‘neglected alternative’
here: namely, while Kant might be right to hold that we cannot
plausibly claim insight into the constraints on the world itself but
only on the nature of our sensibility and understanding, nonetheless we
can argue from this that the world must itself be a certain way to fit
these conditions, without thereby thinking that it is mind-dependent or
that all we thereby know is how things appear to us. The analogy is
thus drawn to a case such as the following: once we know how our lungs
work, we can know what the air must be like in order to allow us to
breath, where the latter is not in any way constituted by the former or
an ‘appearance’ of anything more fundamental (cf. Harrison
1989, Westphal 2004: 68–126).

The features discussed above therefore have a reasonable claim to be
what make transcendental arguments distinctive, at least of the sort we
have considered so far. However, as we shall now go on to see,
transcendental arguments of this type have turned out to be open to
serious objections, so that alternative models have been proposed which
do not incorporate all these features in quite the same way.

Just as the rise in interest in transcendental arguments within
twentieth-century philosophy can largely be traced back to the work of
Strawson, so too the subsequent disillusionment can largely be traced
back to the work of one person, namely Barry Stroud in his influential
1968 article (Stroud 1968). In that paper, Stroud focused on the nature
of the transcendental claim that the truth of some proposition
S is a necessary condition for the possibility of language,
but then argued that ‘the sceptic can always very plausibly
insist that it is enough to make language possible if we
believe that S is true, or that it looks for all the
world as if it is, but that S needn't actually be
true’ (Stroud 1968 [2000b: 24]). Moreover, the general problem
this raises is that if such a response by the skeptic is plausible in
the case of language, perhaps it is also plausible in the case of other
starting-points too? Thus, for example, when it comes to skepticism
about the existence of the external world or other minds, maybe no
argument can be constructed to show there must actually be
such a world or minds as a condition for inner experience or the having
of thoughts, but just that we must believe them to exist, or that they
must seem to us to do so—which hardly looks like enough to
quash skeptical doubts on these matters.

Now, in the 1968 paper, Stroud appears to get to his conclusion by
arguing from an analysis of specific cases (viz. arguments proposed by
Strawson and Shoemaker in Strawson 1959 and Shoemaker 1963
respectively). But then, this may seem to leave open the hope that even
if these arguments fall to his critique, others may not. However, in
subsequent work, Stroud has said more to substantiate his objection and
make it seem more likely to hold across the board. For, while he allows
that we might reasonably be able to make modal claims about ‘how
our thinking in certain ways necessarily requires that we also think in
certain other ways’, he believes it is puzzling
‘how…truths about the world which appear to say or imply
nothing about human thought or experience’ (for example, that
things exist outside us in space and time, or that there are other
minds) ‘[can] be shown to be genuinely necessary conditions of
such psychological facts as that we think and experience things in
certain ways, from which the proofs begin’. Stroud goes on:
‘It would seem that we must find, and cross, a bridge of
necessity from the one to the other. That would be a truly remarkable
feat, and some convincing explanation would surely be needed of how the
whole thing is possible’ (Stroud 1994 [2000b: 158–9; cf. also
212]). Thus, Stroud is prepared to allow ‘that we can come to see
how our thinking in certain ways necessarily requires that we also
think in certain other ways, and so perhaps in certain other ways as
well, and we can appreciate how rich and complicated the relations
between those ways of thinking must be’ (Stroud 1994 [2000b:
158–9]); but he believes that anything more than this, which asserts
that ‘non-psychological facts’ about the world outside us
constitute necessary conditions for our thinking, is problematic.

Then, having apparently established that the strongest defensible
transcendental claims concern merely how things must appear to us or
what we must believe, the second stage of Stroud's argument is
that in order to bridge the gap that this has opened up, and to get to
a conclusion about how things actually are, one must opt
either for verificationism or idealism. The former holds that in order
to meaningful, a sentence must say something that we can determine to
be true or false. If so, then we cannot be left in the limbo of
skeptical doubt behind a veil of appearances wondering where the truth
lies. The latter sees no gap between how the world is and how we think
things are or merely appear to us. However, aside from the potentially
problematic nature of both these positions, an appeal to either
verificationism or idealism is also dialectically unsatisfactory, as
any such appeal would appear to render the transcendental argument
itself redundant—for each on its own is powerful enough to
disarm skeptical worries, without the transcendental manoeuvre now
being required (cf. Stroud 1968 [2000b: 24–5]). In this way, Stroud has
convinced many that the proponent of transcendental arguments faces an
unattractive dilemma: either to dispense with verificationism or
idealism, but fall short of the anti-skeptical conclusion concerning
how things are; or to accept verificationism or idealism, but then make
the transcendental argument itself superfluous.

The problem that Stroud has highlighted may be briefly illustrated by
returning to the exemplars of transcendental arguments that we
considered in Section 1. Thus, when it comes to Kant's Refutation
of Idealism, it can be said that the most that Kant really establishes
is that we have experience as of things outside us in space,
while all that Strawson's objectivity argument shows is that we
must apply the is/seems distinction to our experience, and so
believe that things exist without us experiencing them, but that this
doesn't do enough to show that this distinction is really a valid
one (cf. Wilkerson 1976: 57, Brueckner 1989). Likewise, against Putnam
it is argued that the skeptic can challenge his externalist theory of
reference, where on a more internalist view, you could then think about
being in a vat even if you were in one, as the meaning of
‘vat’ no longer depends on your relations to the world; or,
if Putnam insists on his externalism, it could be claimed that this is
already a position that rules out skepticism because it
assumes that the mind and world are linked in important ways, making it
unnecessary to make appeal to the specific transcendental argument that
Putnam rests upon it (cf. McCulloch 1999). Similarly, against Davidson
it can be argued that thought would be possible, even if the
‘others’ with which one ‘triangulated’ were
nothing but robots or automata; or again, if this is ruled out by
appeal to some form of semantic externalism, this then renders the
transcendental argument redundant. In all these cases, therefore, it
may appear that Stroudian objections can be used to damaging
effect.

Thus, applying Stroud's concerns to a range of arguments in this
way may seem to support the view that the transcendental arguments so
far produced succumb to his dilemma (although, of course, attempts to
bolster the arguments can also be made). Nonetheless, it might be felt
that unless Stroud can substantiate his more principled objection to
the very possibility of crossing the ‘bridge of necessity’
that is required by any sort of world-directed transcendental claim, he
has still not yet established conclusively that no transcendental
argument can be made to work, and must always either fall short or end
up being superfluous. So the question arises: how powerful is his
suggestion that a ‘truly remarkable feat’ is required here,
one that we have good reason to think cannot feasibly be
accomplished?

Perhaps one difficulty that can be raised for Stroud, is that while he
thinks there is something inherently problematic in making a claim
about how the world must be as a condition for our thought or
experience, he does not think that there is anything particularly
problematic about claiming that our thought or experience is a
necessary condition for some other aspect of our thought or experience
– indeed, he exploits such claims himself in his own arguments
against the skeptic (cf. Stroud 1994 [2000b: 165–76]). But how can
claims of necessary connections between some thoughts or experience and
some others be defended more cogently than claims of necessary
connections between some thoughts or experience and the world? Why are
such ‘bridges’ or modal connections easier to make
‘within thought’ than between how we think and how the
world must be to make that thought possible? Now, one might take this
symmetry between the two to be reason to be suspicious of modal claims
of this sort at any level: but as we have seen, Stroud himself
seems to think they are viable between ‘psychological
facts’ (cf. Stroud 2000a [2000b: 224–44]). If so, it could be
argued, he needs to give us some account of why they are less
problematic here than between our thought and the world; but in fact he
just seems to take it to be obvious, and so provides no such account
(cf. Cassam 1987: 356–7; Glock 2003: 38–9).

However, even if Stroud's position is indeed weaker than it may
at first appear, this does not mean that transcendental arguments are
in the clear when it comes to the world-directed transcendental claims
they embody. For, a different worry to the same effect can also be
urged against them, which in this case relates to the dialectics of our
engagements with skepticism (cf. Stern 2007). The central thought is
this: On the one hand, the skeptic is often conceived as grounding her
doubts on the fallibility of our ordinary belief-forming processes,
such as perception and memory. On the other hand, the proponent of a
transcendental argument hopes to answer her doubts by advancing the
claim that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of
Y and so deduce the former from the latter. But the
dialectical concern this raises is this: why, if the skeptic is
dubious about cognitive methods like perception and memory, should she
be any more sanguine about the methods we have used (whatever these
are) to arrive at the modal claims embodied in the transcendental
argument?

Now, one line of response might be to say that the doubts the skeptic
raises over our modal knowledge here can themselves be blocked or shown
to be spurious, for example, by providing evidence for the reliability
of our methods in the modal case, or questioning the right of the
skeptic to use the mere possibility of error against such knowledge.
But then, it seems likely that similar claims could also be
used to bolster the credentials of our non-transcendental
bases for knowledge, such as perception and memory, in a way that would
then render the transcendental argument redundant.

Thus, even if Stroud's own critique of transcendental arguments
is found wanting, it seems that another along these lines can be put in
its place, leading to a similar dilemma: either transcendental
arguments are offered to try to establish what the skeptic questions,
but are then vulnerable to skeptical doubts concerning the truth of the
modal claims they employ; or they can successfully respond to those
doubts, but in ways that then seem likely to render our
non-transcendental grounds for knowledge legitimate too, so that our
conviction concerning such knowledge no longer seems to need to make
any appeal to a transcendental argument.

While it would be premature to say that attempts to construct
ambitious world-directed transcendental arguments have been entirely
abandoned (see e.g., Peacocke 1989), nonetheless the most common way of
responding to these Stroudian difficulties has been to re-think how
transcendental arguments might be best used, and to come up with
strategies that are in various ways more modest than those we have
discussed so far. What characterises such modest responses is the idea
that Stroud is indeed right that all we can really
substantiate by way of a transcendental claim is how things must appear
to us or how we must believe them to be—but then attempt to
make this weakened claim do some anti-skeptical work. I will briefly
consider four such responses: one from Strawson's earlier work;
one from his later writings; one from Stroud; and one from Stern
2000.

The first response takes its inspiration from a re-consideration of the
Strawsonian transcendental arguments that were criticised by Stroud,
but offers a different interpretation of them in the light of that
critique. Thus, it is suggested, the mistake is to see Strawson's
argument as straightforwardly world-directed in the way that it was
presented earlier, as offering a direct response to the skeptic by
proving what the skeptic doubts. Rather, it is said, the strategy is
more like Aristotle's elenchic response to the skeptic who doubts
the principle of non-contradiction: namely, to show that her doubts
cannot be intelligibly stated or expressed, as acceptance of this
principle is a necessary condition for having meaningful thought at
all. Likewise, therefore, it can be suggested that Strawson intended
his transcendental approach to operate in the same way, where (as
Strawson puts it) ‘[the skeptic's] doubts are unreal, not
simply because they are logically unresolvable doubts, but because they
amount to the rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which
alone such doubts make sense’ (Strawson 1959: 35; cf. also 106
and 109, and also Glock 2003: 35–6 and Illies 2003: 44–56). Thus, it
may seem, a modest transcendental claim is all that we require, to the
effect that the skeptic cannot raise a doubt to challenge us here,
given what she must believe in order for her to think or utter anything
intelligible at all. The transcendental argument is effective,
therefore, not by showing that what the skeptic doubts is false, but by
showing that those doubts have violated the conditions of
meaningfulness, and thus require no positive answer or response.

Now, whether or not this is the most charitable way of reading
Strawson's earlier position, he himself does not seem to have
adopted quite this first response when he came to reply to Stroud in
his later work. Rather, while he accepts Stroud's insistence that
the transcendental claim must be weakened (cf. Strawson 1985: 9), he
then also offers what he call a naturalistic reply to the
skeptic based on Hume and also on some Wittgensteinian ideas developed
in On Certainty, according to which the right approach to
skeptical doubts is not to try to answer them with an argument, but to
show them to be ‘idle’, as unable to shift those core
beliefs which are implanted in us by nature or which lie at the centre
of our ways of thinking (cf. Strawson 1985: 13). Here, then, the
approach is not about the meaninglessness or unintelligibility of
skeptical doubt (as on the first response), but on its inability to
shift or dislodge our beliefs because of their embeddedness within our
thinking (where semantic issues need not be the only consideration in
rendering them embedded in this way). Within this naturalistic
approach, therefore, Strawson suggests that transcendental arguments
can do valuable work, in precisely helping us to show the skeptic that
some beliefs are fundamental to us in this way, and thus impervious to
skeptical doubt just as the naturalist claims—but where to play
this role, the transcendental claim only has to be a modest one,
concerning what we must believe, not how things are (cf. Strawson 1985:
21–23; see also Grayling 1985).

A third type of modest approach is offered by Stroud himself, where he
claims that even a transcendental argument which shows what we must
believe can have anti-skeptical value, in showing that these beliefs
are indispensible and invulnerable, in the sense that
we not only cannot abandon them, but also we cannot find them to be
false in ourselves or others, because to so find them would be to give
up believing anything at all. However, Stroud allows that this sort of
status for the belief in question—for example, the belief that
there are enduring particulars, or other minds—does not go as far
as ruling out the possibility that belief of this sort are in fact not
true (see Stroud 1994, 1999).

Finally, in Stern 2000, it is argued that modest transcendental
arguments can be shown to be useful against skepticism, once we
distinguish sufficiently carefully between the kinds of skepticism
there are, and go for the right target or targets—where a less
demanding form of skepticism may perhaps be defeated by a less
ambitious transcendental claim. So, for example, if we take the target
to be a skeptic who demands certainty, then a modest transcendental
argument will not suffice. But if we take the skeptic to be one who
demands merely justification that may nonetheless be fallible, and who
claims we do not have even this because our beliefs are not properly
supported by our generally accepted cognitive norms, then (it is
claimed) a modest transcendental argument can indeed be useful. So, for
example, the justificatory skeptic may claim that our belief in other
minds seems to be grounded on nothing but the link between behaviour
and mentality that we observe in our own case; but then, she can argue,
it is based on little more than a poor argument from analogy, which we
are not properly warranted in extending to others, as we are arguing
from only a single instance (viz., ourselves), which is an inadequate
inductive base on which to reason in this way. In response, however, it
could be argued that unless others appeared to us as more than mere
bodies, but instead as persons with minds, we could not acquire the
capacity to apply mentalistic predicates to ourselves, and thus become
self-conscious. This argument remains ‘modest’ because its
transcendental claim extends only to how others must appear to us, and
so is not ‘world-directed’ in the manner of more ambitious
transcendental arguments; but even so, the idea is, it is still
sufficient to show that our belief in these other minds is not merely
based on a faulty inference in the way that the justificatory skeptic
supposes, but rather on the nature of our experience—where as such,
it can therefore be used to show that this belief is warranted, even if
it could still be false.

Now, none of these approaches is unobjectionable, and it remains to be
seen which, if any, is to be preferred. Concern about the Aristotelian
approach can relate to whether it can show that belief in X is
necessary for intelligible thought in general, or for thought
by creatures like us—where if it only establishes the
latter, the possibility of a skeptic raising intelligible doubts about
it would seem to remain, while establishing the former seems extremely
demanding if not impossible (cf. Körner 1967). Further, the worry
might be raised in a Stroudian spirit, that all this approach shows is
that doubts cannot be expressed concerning X, but where that
then seems to fall short of establishing that X is really the
case. And finally, while it may perhaps seem right to say that there is
something unintelligible or meaningless about questioning the principle
of non-contradiction (although this can also be challenged: cf. Priest
1987), other skeptical doubts do not seem problematic to the same
degree. (For further discussion points of this sort, see Illies 2003:
54–63.) Along similar lines, critics have also questioned
Strawson's naturalistic approach, as not fully answering the
skeptical challenge: for even if a doubt here is ‘idle’, it
does not follow that what is questioned is really true (cf. Valberg
1992: 168–96, Sen 1995). Likewise, when it comes to Stroud's
position, as he himself admits, the indispensability and
invulnerability he speaks of ‘might not seem like much
reassurance in the face of a general scepticism’ (Stroud 1999:
168), given that it not only does not rule out the possibility of
falsity, but also seemingly gives no additional reasons for taking that
possibility less seriously. Moreover, it has been suggested that
Stroud's position is unstable, as the claim that certain beliefs
are invulnerable on the one hand, and the acceptance that they might be
untrue on the other, seem to stand in tension with one another (see
Brueckner 1996). The position proposed in Stern 2000 tries to get round
these difficulties, but has also been accused of ducking important
aspects of the skeptic's challenge (see e.g., Sacks 1999 and 2000:
276–85; and for Sack's own positive proposals, see Sacks 2005a,
2005b and 2006).

Whatever their respective strengths and weaknesses, one thing these
modest strategies have suggested is that some of the central features
of transcendental arguments outlined above do not fit arguments of this
less ambitious sort. Thus, these arguments are not world-directed, but
are experience- or belief-directed. Secondly, they do not expect the
transcendental arguments to refute the skeptic on their own (as it
were), but in conjunction with broader epistemological or
anti-skeptical considerations (such as naturalism, or perceptual and
other epistemic norms). Thirdly, by offering an approach that is more
modest, they raise the question of how much adequate responses to
skepticism are entitled to assume and what kinds of reassurance they
are meant to provide (cf. Hookway 1999). And in all these ways, they
have raised exegetical issues about how Kant's place in the canon
discussed above might be understood differently, concerning his
attitude to skepticism and whether in the end his intentions are best
interpreted in ‘modest’ or more ambitious terms (cf.
Callanan 2006; Bardon 2006; Stapelford 2008).

As we have seen, then, when it comes to transcendental arguments in
epistemology, most of the effort in recent years has been concentrated
at the meta-level, concerning what transcendental arguments are and
what they can be expected to achieve: when it comes to examples of
transcendental arguments themselves, very few new ones have actually
been proposed. However, the picture is different in ethics, where
attempts to produce such arguments are still being made, so that while
epistemology perhaps remains their natural home, the use of
transcendental arguments in ethics is of undoubted significance.
Moreover, as with such arguments in epistemology, when it comes to
transcendental claims in ethics, Kant may again be taken as an important
inspiration, especially Kant 1785.

In fact, in view of what was said previously regarding the problems of
transcendental arguments, it is perhaps not really surprising that
ethicists have had fewer qualms in producing them. For, as we saw, the
difficulty when it comes to external world skepticism, other minds
skepticism, and the like, is in finding an argument that will
successfully cross Stroud's ‘bridge of necessity’,
and establish a conclusion concerning how things are, rather than how
things must appear or how we must believe them to be, and so reach a
conclusion that will satisfy the realist about such matters. However,
in ethics, it is much more acceptable to reject realism, and to adopt a
more anti-realist position of some sort at the outset; as a result, the
most that will be called for is a modest transcendental argument which
is not world-directed, as many ethicists do not want to treat moral
values and norms as part of the ‘world’ anyway, and so see
no victory for the skeptic in failing to establish any more ambitious
conclusion, where this may still be a worry in the epistemological
cases.

Whilst until recently there was only a limited discussion of
transcendental arguments in ethics within the ‘analytic’
tradition of Anglo-American philosophy (see e.g., Phillips-Griffiths
1957–8; Watt 1975; Harrison 1976; Cooper 1976), they have played a
significant role in the social philosophy of thinkers such as Karl-Otto
Apel and Jürgen Habermas. Apel has argued that an ethical
perspective is required as a condition for a commitment to truth,
inquiry and successful communication. Habermas denies this, where
instead he thinks that we are committed to communication and discourse
by the pragmatic implications of speech oriented towards reaching
understanding of each other, which for us, as speaking beings, is
unavoidable. Both may be said to be inspired by C. S. Peirce's
insistence on the relation between truth and consensus, where the
search for consensus is said to require as a necessary condition that
we have certain ethical attitudes to others, such as equal respect and
tolerance for their views and commitments. (See Apel 1976b vol II/1980
and 1976a; Habermas 1983. For further discussion see Benhabib and
Dallmayr (eds.) 1995 and Illies 2003: 64–92.)

Moreover, transcendental claims have been given a more prominent role
within recent Anglo-American ethical theory, largely through the work
of Alan Gewirth and Christine Korsgaard. These arguments start not from
claims about truth and communication, but from claims about our nature
as human agents, and what we must then presuppose about the moral
status of ourselves and others. As in epistemology, the promise of such
arguments in ethics has generated much interest and attention. For
illustration, we will discuss a transcendental argument in ethics
proposed by Korsgaard. (For Gewirth, see Gewirth 1981; Beyleveld 1991;
and Illies 2003: 93–128.)

Korsgaard's use of a transcendental argument in fact forms only
part of a wider response to skeptical worries about the demands of
morality (‘the normative question’), and is deployed merely
to convince the skeptic that her own humanity has value, from which a
further argument concerning the publicity of reasons is used to show
that she must also then value the humanity of others. The
transcendental argument that Korsgaard proposes is modelled on a
position which she finds in Kant and which she outlines as
follows:

[Kant] started from the fact that when we make a choice we must regard
its object as good. His point is the one I have been making—that
being human we must endorse our impulses before we can act on them. He
asked what it is that makes these objects good, and, rejecting one
form of realism, he decided that the goodness was not in the objects
themselves. Were it not for our desires and inclinations—and for
the various physiological, psychological, and social conditions which
gave rise to those desires and inclinations—we would not find
their objects good. Kant saw that we take things to be important
because they are important to us—and he concluded that we must
therefore take ourselves to be important. In this way, the value of
humanity itself is implicit in every human choice. If complete
normative scepticism is to be avoided—if there is such a thing
as a reason for action—then humanity, as the source of all
reasons and values, must be valued for its own sake. (Korsgaard 1996:
122)

This argument can be laid out as follows:

(1)

To rationally choose to do X, you must regard
doing X as good.

(2)

You cannot regard doing X as good in itself,
but can only regard doing X as good because it satisfies your
needs, desires, inclinations, etc.

(3)

You cannot regard your desiring or needing to
do X as making it good unless you regard yourself as
valuable.

(4)

Therefore, you must regard yourself as valuable, if
you are to make any rational choice.

Consider this example. To rationally choose to eat this piece of
chocolate cake, I must think that eating the cake is good in some way. How
can I regard it as good? It seems implausible to say that eating the cake is
good in itself, of intrinsic value. It also seems implausible to say
that it is good just because it satisfies a desire as such: for even
if I was bulimic it might do that, but still not be regarded as
good. A third suggestion, then, is that it can be seen as good because
it is good for me, as satisfying a genuine need or desire of mine. But
if I think this is what makes eating the piece of cake good, I must value
myself, as otherwise I could not hold that satisfying me is sufficient
to make something good enough for it to be rational for me to choose to do
it; so I must regard myself as valuable. Put conversely: suppose that
you thought that you and your life were utterly worthless, pointless,
meaningless—that in your eyes, you were valueless. And suppose
that you are faced with a piece of cake: on what basis would you choose
it eat it? It seems unlikely that there is something intrinsically
good about eating it, or that you should do so just because you find
yourself with a desire to do so, even while finding your existence
valueless. It seems that the only reason to do so would be if you
thought eating the cake brought you some genuine benefit—but if
you thought your life was worthless, how could you see this as a
reason either? Why is bringing benefit to something that in your eyes
is so utterly without value a reasonable thing to do?

There are some dangers in this argument, however. One, which Korsgaard
considers, is that it might lead to ‘self-conceit’
(Korsgaard 1998: 54. Cf. also Korsgaard 1996: 249–50): that is, I might
conclude from this that I am supremely valuable, simply as Bob Stern,
which could obviously then get in the way of my ethical treatment of
others. But, this worry might be lessened by the thought that while the
argument gets me to see that I must find something valuable about me,
it need not be anything about me in particular, and perhaps could
instead be something about me that is more general—such as my
humanity or personhood. However, while Korsgaard says that reflection
will indeed lead us in this more general direction, we will need to see
how. A second, perhaps related, worry is that this argument has a
troubling parallel in the case of Satan, where Satan goes through (1)
to (4) above, and concludes that he must regard his devilish nature as
valuable. If this argument somehow entitles us to regard our own
humanity or personhood as valuable, why doesn't it entitle Satan
to think the same about his nature? This is not the same as
self-conceit, because he is not valuing himself as Satan just qua
Satan; he is valuing his nature, just as we are valuing ours. Nor does
devilishness seem any less central to his nature than humanity is to
ours. So it is hard to see how the Satanic parallel can be avoided by
the argument as it stands.

Nonetheless, it is possible that something can be built on the central
idea of the argument, which seems to be this: As long as we think we
can act for reasons based on the value of things, but at the same time
reject any realism about that value applying to things independently of
us, then we must be treated as the source of value and in a way that
makes rational choice possible. We can therefore see Korsgaard's
second argument as attempting something along these lines, using her
notion of practical identity to perhaps avoid the two problems we have
identified with the Kantian argument.

Here, then, is an outline of Korsgaard's second argument:

(1)

To rationally choose to do X, you must take it
that doing X is the rational thing to do.

(2)

Since there is no reason in itself to do X, you
can take it that X is the rational thing to do only if you
regard your practical identity as making X the rational thing
to do.

(3)

You cannot regard your practical identity as making
doing X the rational thing to do unless you can see some value
in that practical identity.

(4)

You cannot see any value in any particular practical
identity as such, but can regard it as valuable only because of the
contribution it makes to giving you reasons and values by which to
live.

(5)

You cannot see having a practical identity as valuable
in this way unless you think your having a life containing reasons and
values is important.

(6)

You cannot regard it as important that your life
contain reasons and values unless you regard your leading a rationally
structured life as valuable.

(7)

You cannot regard your leading a rationally structured
life as valuable unless you value yourself qua rational agent.

(8)

Therefore, you must value yourself qua rational agent,
if you are to make any rational choice.

The first step is now familiar: To act is to do or choose something
for a reason. The second step is based on Korsgaard's idea that
we have reasons to act because of our practical identities (such as
one's identity as a father, or lecturer, or Englishman), not
because acts have reasons attached to them in themselves. Once again,
realists might demur, claiming that some actions are rational things to
do, because some things have value as such: so, perhaps knowledge is
valuable in itself, thereby making it rational to seek it. But let us
leave such worries aside and assume with Korsgaard that nothing is
objectively rational for us to do.

The third step asks how a practical identity can make something into a
reason for an agent: how can the fact that I am a father make it
rational for me to buy my daughter this toy? The thought here is that
it can only do so if you see value in that identity. Korsgaard stresses
this when she writes:

The conception of one's identity in question here is not a
theoretical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable
scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under
which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life
to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. (Korsgaard
1996: 101)

So, being a father, whether contingently or essentially, gives one
no reason to be a caring or devoted father of a sort that would have
good reason to buy a daughter a gift; rather, valuing one's
fatherhood does this.

But (moving on to step (4)), how can I see my particular practical
identity as valuable? I think Korsgaard's position here is that I
cannot see any value in any particular practical identity as such: for,
to do so would mean being committed to realism, to thinking that being
a father, an Englishman, a university lecturer or whatever matters as
such; or (in a way that is in the end equally realist), it matters
because of the intrinsically valuable things it leads you to do. But,
Korsgaard takes such realist positions to be problematic, and so thinks
this will not do as an answer.

So suppose we allow that no particular practical identity can be seen
to have value in itself; Korsgaard then offers as the only remaining
explanation of its value to the agent that has that identity, that such
identities have the general capacity of enabling the agent to live a
life containing reasons: because I have whatever particular practical
identities I do (father, Englishman, university lecturer…), I
can then find things to be valuable and act rationally accordingly, in
a way that gives me unity as a
subject.

But then (step (5)), to think that this makes having some sort of
particular practical identity important, you must think that it matters
that your life have the sort of rational structure that having such
identities provides; but (step (6)), to see that as mattering, you must
see value in your leading a rationally structured life. And then,
finally, to see value in your leading such a life, you must see your
rational nature as valuable, which is to value your humanity.

Does this Korsgaardian argument avoid the pitfalls of the Kantian one
discussed earlier? I think it avoids the problem of self-conceit,
because it does seem that what you end up valuing is not yourself
simply as such, but yourself qua rational agent. And I think as I have
presented it, it avoids the problem of the Satanic parallel, because
all it shows is that Satan must value his rational nature, not his
devilishness.

For both these problems to be avoided, however, it is important to run
the argument as outlined above, not as it is sometimes presented by
Korsgaard, which is via the notion of need (cf. Korsgaard 1996: 121 and
125). This would follow the same premises as before for (1)–(5), and
then go as follows:

(6*)

You cannot regard it as important that your life contain
reasons and values unless you take your need to lead this sort of life
as important

(7*)

You cannot take this need to be important unless you take
yourself to be valuable

(8*)

Therefore, you must value yourself, if you are to make any
rational choice

The difficulty with (6*)–(8*), I think, is that (8*) does not
stipulate what it is about yourself that you are required to value, so
that this could be my sheer particularity (self-conceit), or if I am
not in fact human, my non-human nature (Satan). This is because (6*)
just identifies a need, and says that this need could not be important
unless the agent who has the need were seen to be valuable somehow
– whereas the previous argument narrows value down to rational
agency, and so rules out both self-conceit and devilishness.

We have therefore reconstructed that part of Korsgaard's
strategy which offers an argument to the effect that you must value
your humanity, as a transcendental argument. It turns out that if it is
to be made plausible in this way, a lot depends on accepting
Korsgaard's arguments against realism; but then, as we have seen,
many have always suspected that some commitment to anti-realism is
required to make a transcendental argument convincing. A further worry
when it comes to external world skepticism, as we discussed above
(§3), is that this commitment can appear to make the argument
redundant, because anti-realism appears sufficient as a response to
skepticism on its own. However, in this ethical case, this worry is
perhaps less of a concern, because a skeptic could endorse an
anti-realist position in metaethics, without accepting that they or
others have value as a matter of their normative ethics, so that there
is still work left for the transcendental argument to do. To this
extent, therefore, it is not surprising that Korsgaard's claims
have given further impetus to the debate concerning what transcendental
arguments are, and what they can contribute. (For further discussion of
Korsgaard's position as an interpretation of Kant, see Wood 1999:
125–32 and Timmermann 2006; and for further discussion, see
Skorupski 1998, Skidmore 2002, Enoch 2006, Stern 2011.)

We have looked in some depth at the role of transcendental arguments
that have been given in philosophy, not only in refuting the
epistemological skeptic but also in ethics. As we have seen, such
arguments clearly face challenges, both in their details but also at a
more general level, concerning how much they can ever hope to achieve.
However, while these challenges are certainly significant, it would be
wrong to exaggerate them: for, as we have also seen, the range of
potential uses for such arguments is wide, while it seems that their
intriguing power, as well as their alluring promise, will mean that
philosophers will continue to be drawn to them. As a result, therefore,
it seems unlikely that those engaged in the subject will ever cease to
feel that ‘tenderness for transcendental arguments’
(Strawson 1985: 21) instilled in them by Kant and others.

Apel, K-O. (1980). The a priori of the communication
community and the foundation of ethics: The problem of a rational
foundation of ethics in the scientific age. In Towards a
transformation of philosophy, trans. G. Adey and
D. Frisby. London, Routledge.

Kant, I. (1781/1787).
Critique of pure reason (trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood).
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (References
are in the standard pagination of the 1st (A) and
2nd (B) editions. A reference to only one edition means that
the passage appeared only in that edition.)

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